Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Presently she looked up.

  “Now I see how much I should have to gain. But what would you gain?”

  The question was no sooner asked than Rachel foresaw the pretty speech which was its obvious answer. Mr. Steel, however, refrained from making it.

  “I am an oldish man,” he said, “and — yes, there is no use in denying that I am comfortably off. I want a wife; or rather, my neighbors seem bent upon finding me one; and, if the worst has to come to the worst, I prefer to choose for myself. Matrimony, however, is about the very last state of life that I desire, and I take it to be the same with you. Therefore — to put the cart before the horse — you would suit me ideally. One’s own life would be unaltered, but the Delverton mothers would cease from troubling, and at the head of my establishment there would be a lady of whom I should be most justly proud. And even in my own life I should, I hope, be the more than occasional gainer by her society; may I also add, by her sympathy, by her advice? Mrs. Minchin,” cried Steel, with sudden feeling, “the conditions shall be very rigid; my lawyer shall see to that; nor shall I allow myself a loophole for any weakness or nonsense whatsoever in the future. Old fellows like myself have made fools of themselves before to-day, but you shall be safeguarded from the beginning. Let there be no talk or thought of love between us from first to last! But as for admiration, I don’t mind telling you that I admire you as I never admired any woman in the world before; and I hope, in spite of that, we shall be friends.”

  Still the indicative mood, still not for a moment the conditional! Rachel did not fail to make another note; but now there was nothing bitter even in her thoughts. She believed in this man, and in his promises; moreover, she began to focus the one thing about him in which she disbelieved. It was his feeling towards her — nothing more and nothing else. There he was insincere; but it was a pardonable insincerity, after all.

  Of his admiration she was convinced; it had been open and honest all along; but there was something deeper than admiration. He could say what he liked. The woman knew. And what could it be but love?

  The woman knew; and though the tragedy of her life was so close behind her; nay, though mystery and suspicion encompassed her still, as they might until her death, the woman thrilled.

  It was a thrill of excitement chiefly, but excitement was not the only element. There was the personal factor, too; there was the fascination which this man had for her, which he could exert at will, and which he was undoubtedly exerting now.

  To escape from his eyes, to think but once more for herself, and by herself, Rachel rose at last, and looked from the window which lit this recess.

  It was the usual November day in London; no sun; a mist, but not a fog; cabmen in capes, horses sliding on the muddy street, well-dressed women picking their way home from church — shabby women hurrying in shawls — hurrying as Rachel herself had done the night before — as she might again to-night. And whither? And whither, in all the world?

  Rachel turned from the window with a shudder; she caught up the first newspaper of the sheaf upon the writing-table. Steel had moved into the body of the room; she could not even see him through the alcove. So much the better; she would discover for herself what they said.

  Leading articles are easily found, and in a Sunday paper they are seldom long. Rachel was soon through the first, her blood boiling; the second she could not finish for her tears; the third dried her eyes with the fires of fierce resentment. It was not so much what they said; it was what they were obviously afraid to say. It was their circumlocution, their innuendo, their mild surprise, their perfunctory congratulations, their assumption of chivalry and their lack of its essence, that wounded and stung the subject of these effusions. As she raised her flushed face from the last of them, Mr. Steel stood before her once more, the incarnation of all grave sympathy and consideration.

  “You must not think,” said he, “that my proposal admits of no alternative but the miserable one of making your own way in a suspicious and uncharitable world. On the contrary, if I am not to be your nominal and legal husband, I still intend to be your actual friend. On the first point you are to be consulted, but on the second not even you shall stand in my way. Nor in that event would I attempt to rob you of the independence which you value so highly; on the other hand, I would point the way to an independence worth having. I am glad you have seen those papers, though to-morrow they may be worse. Well, you may be shocked, but, if you won’t have me, the worse the better, say I! Your case was most iniquitously commented upon before ever it came for trial; there is sure to be a fresh crop of iniquities now; but I shall be much mistaken if you cannot mulct the more flagrant offenders in heavy damages for libel.”

  Rachel shivered at the thought. She was done with her case for ever and for ever. People could think her guilty if they liked, but that the case should breed other cases, and thus drag on and on, and, above all, that she should make money out of all that past horror, what an unbearable idea!

  On second thoughts, Mr. Steel agreed.

  “Then you must let me send you back to Australia.” No, no, no; she could never show her face there again, or anywhere else where she was known. She must begin life afresh, that was evident.

  “It was evident to me,” said Steel, quietly, “though not more so than the injustice of it, from the very beginning. Hence the plans and proposals that I have put before you.”

  Rachel regarded him wildly; the Sunday papers had driven her to desperation, as, perhaps, it was intended that they should.

  “Are you sure,” she cried, “that they would not know me — up north?”

  “Not from Eve,” he answered airily. “I should see to that; and, besides, we should first travel, say until the summer.”

  “If only I could begin my life again!” said Rachel to herself, but aloud, in a way that made no secret of her last, most desperate inclination.

  “That is exactly what I wish you to do,” Steel rejoined quietly, even gently, his hand lying lightly but kindly upon her quivering shoulder. How strong his touch, how firm, how reassuring! It was her first contact with his hand.

  “I wish it so much,” he went on, “that I would have your past life utterly buried, even between ourselves; nay, if it were possible, even in your own mind also! I, for my part, would undertake never to ask you one solitary question about that life — on one small and only fair condition. Supposing we make a compact now?”

  “Anything to bury my own past,” owned Rachel; “yes, I would do anything — anything!”

  “Then you must help me to bury mine, too,” he said. “I was never married, but a past I have.”

  “I would do my best,” said Rachel, “if I married you.”

  “You will do your best,” added Steel, correcting her; “and there is my compact cut and dried. I ask you nothing; you ask me nothing; and there is to be no question of love between us, first or last. But we help each other to forget — from this day forth!”

  Rachel could not speak; his eyes were upon her, black, inscrutable, arrestive of her very faculties, to say nothing of her will. She could only answer him when he had turned away and was moving towards the door.

  “Where are you going?” she cried.

  “To send to my solicitor,” replied Steel, “as I warned him that I might. It has all to be drawn up; and there is the question of a settlement; and other questions, perhaps, which you may like to put to him yourself without delay.”

  CHAPTER IX

  A CHANGE OF SCENE

  The Reverend Hugh Woodgate, Vicar of Marley-in-Delverton — a benefice for generations in the gift of the Dukes of Normanthorpe, but latterly in that of one John Buchanan Steel — was writing his sermon on a Friday afternoon just six months after the foregoing events. The month was therefore May, and, at either end of the long, low room in which Mr. Woodgate sat at work, the windows were filled with a flutter of summer curtains against a brilliant background of waving greenery. But a fire burned in one of the two fireplaces in the old-fa
shioned funnel of a room, for a treacherous east wind skimmed the sunlit earth outside, and whistled and sang through one window as the birds did through the other.

  Mr. Woodgate was a tall, broad-shouldered, mild-eyed man, with a blot of whisker under each ear, and the cleanest of clerical collars encompassing his throat. It was a kindly face that pored over the unpretentious periods, as they grew by degrees upon the blue-lined paper, in the peculiar but not uncommon hand which is the hall-mark of a certain sort of education upon a certain order of mind. The present specimen was perhaps more methodical than most; therein it was characteristic of the man. From May to September, Mr. Woodgate never failed to finish his sermon on the Friday, that on the Saturday he might be free to play cricket with his men and lads. He was a poor preacher and no cricketer at all; but in both branches he did his best, with the simple zeal and the unconscious sincerity which redeemed not a few of his deficiencies.

  So intent was the vicar upon his task, so engrossed in the expression of that which had already been expressed many a million times, that he did not hear wheels in his drive, on the side where the wind sang loudest; he heard nothing until the door opened, and a girl in her twenties, trim, slim, and brown with health, came hurriedly in.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, dear, but who do you think is here?”

  Hugh Woodgate turned round in his chair, and his honest ox-eyes filled with open admiration of the wife who was so many years younger than himself, and who had seen in him Heaven knew what! He never could look at her without that look first; and only now, after some years of marriage, was he beginning sometimes to do so without this thought next. But he had not the gift of expression, even in the perpetual matter of his devotion; and perhaps its perpetuity owed something to that very want; at least there was none of the verbal evaporation which comes of too much lovers’ talk.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Venables!”

  Woodgate groaned. Was he obliged to appear? His jaw fell, and his wife’s eyes sparkled.

  “Dear, I wouldn’t even have let you know she was here — you shouldn’t have been interrupted for a single instant — if Mrs. Venables wasn’t clamoring to see you. And really I begin to clamor too; for she is full of some mysterious news, which she won’t tell me till you are there to hear it also. Be an angel, for five minutes!”

  Woodgate wiped his pen in his deliberate way.

  “Probably one of the girls is engaged,” said he; “if so I hope it’s Sybil.”

  “No, Sybil is here too; she doesn’t look a bit engaged, but rather bored, as though she had heard the story several times already, whatever it may be. They have certainly paid several calls. Now you look quite nice, so in you come.”

  Mrs. Venables, a stout but comely lady, with a bright brown eye, and a face full of character and ability, opened fire upon the vicar as soon as they had shaken hands, while her daughter looked wistfully at the nearest books.

  “He is married!” cried Mrs. Venables, beginning in the middle like a modern novelist.

  “Indeed?” returned the matter-of-fact clergyman, with equal directness— “and who is he?”

  “Your neighbor and your patron — Mr. Steel!”

  “Married?” repeated Mrs. Woodgate, with tremendous emphasis. “Mr. Steel?”

  “This is news!” declared her husband, as though he had expected none worthy of the name. And they both demanded further particulars, at which Mrs. Venables shook her expensive bonnet with great relish.

  “Do you know Mr. Steel so well — so much better than we do — and can you ask for particulars about anything he ever does? His marriage,” continued Mrs. Venables, “like everything else about him, is ‘wrop in mystery,’ as one of those vulgar creatures says in Dickens, but I really forget which. It was never announced in the Times; for that I can vouch myself. Was ever anything more like him, or less like anybody else? To disappear for six months, and then turn up with a wife!”

  “But has he turned up?” cried the vicar’s young wife, forgetting for a moment a certain preoccupation caused by the arrival of the tea-tray, and by a rapid resignation to the thickness of the bread and butter and the distressing absence of such hot things as would have been in readiness if Mrs. Venables had been expected for a single moment. It showed the youth of Morna Woodgate that she should harbor a wish to compete with the wealthiest woman in the neighborhood, even in the matter of afternoon tea, and her breeding that no such thought was legible in her clear-cut open-air face.

  “I have heard nothing about it,” said the vicar, in a tone indicative of much honest doubt in the matter.

  “Nor is it the case, to my knowledge,” rejoined Mrs. Venables; “but from all we hear it may become the case any moment. They were married in Italy last autumn — so he says — and are on their way home at this minute.”

  “If he says so,” observed the vicar, with mild humor, “it is probably true. He ought to know.”

  “And who was she?” his young wife asked with immense interest, the cups having gone round, and the bread and butter been accepted in spite of its proportions.

  “My dear Mrs. Woodgate,” said Mrs. Venables, cordially, “you may well ask! Who was she, indeed! It was the first question I asked my own informant, who, by the way, was your friend, Mr. Langholm; but he knew no more than the man in the moon.”

  “And who told Mr. Langholm, of all people?” pursued Morna Woodgate. “It is not often that we get news of the real world from him!”

  “Birds of a feather,” remarked her caller: “it was Mr. Steel himself who wrote to your other eccentric friend, and told him neither more nor less than I have told you. He was married in Italy last autumn; not even the town — not even the month — let alone the lady’s name — if, indeed—”

  And Mrs. Venables concluded with a sufficiently eloquent hiatus.

  “I imagine she is a lady,” said the vicar to his tea.

  “You are so charitable, dear Mr. Woodgate!”

  “I hope I am,” he said simply. “In this case I see no reason to be anything else.”

  “What — when you know really nothing about Mr. Steel himself?”

  And the bright brown eyes of Mrs. Venables grew smaller and harder as they pinned Hugh Woodgate to his chair.

  “I beg your pardon,” said that downright person; “I know a great deal about Mr. Steel. He has done an immense amount for the parish; there are our new schoolrooms to speak for themselves. There are very few who would do the half of what Mr. Steel has done for us during the short time he has been at Normanthorpe.”

  “That may be,” said the lady, with the ample smile of conscious condescension; “for he has certainly not omitted to let his light shine before men. But that is not telling us who or what he was before he came here, or how he made his money.”

  Then Hugh Woodgate gave the half boyish, half bashful laugh with which he was wont to preface his most candid sayings.

  “And I don’t think it’s any business of ours,” he said.

  Morna went a trifle browner than she naturally was; her husband said so little that what he did say was often almost painfully to the point; and now Mrs. Venables had turned from him to her, with a smile which the young wife disliked, for it called attention to the vicar’s discourtesy while it appealed to herself for prettier manners and better sense. It was a moment requiring some little tact, but Mrs. Woodgate was just equal to it.

  “Hugh, how rude of you!” she exclaimed, with only the suspicion of a smile. “You forget that it’s your duty to be friendly with everybody; there’s no such obligation on anybody else.”

  “I should be friendly with Mr. Steel,” said Hugh, “duty or no duty, after what he has done for the parish.”

  And his pleasant honest face and smile did away with the necessity for a set apology.

  “I must say,” added his wife to her visitor, “that it’s the same with me, you know.”

  There was a pause.

  “Then you intend to call upon her
?” said Mrs. Venables, coming with directness to an obviously premeditated point.

  “I do — I must — it is so different with us,” said the vicar’s young wife, with her pretty brown blush.

  “Certainly,” added the vicar himself, with dogmatic emphasis.

  Mrs. Venables did not look at him, but she looked the harder at Morna instead.

  “Well,” said she, “I suppose you are right. In your position — yes — your position is quite different!” And the sudden, half accidental turn of her sentence put Mrs. Venables on good terms with herself once more; and so she rose all smiles and velvet. “No, not even half a cup; but it was really quite delicious; and I hope you’ll come and see me soon, and tell me all about her. At his age!” she whispered as she went. “At sixty-five — if he’s a day!”

  A stranger would have imagined that this lady had quite decided not to call upon the newcomer herself; even Mrs. Woodgate was uncertain of her neighbor’s intention as the latter’s wheels ground the Vicarage drive once more, and she and her husband were left alone.

  “It will depend upon the county,” said she; “and Mrs. Venables is not the county pure and simple, she’s half Northborough still, and she’ll take her cue from the Invernesses and the Uniackes. But I do believe she’s been round the whole country-side, getting people to say they won’t call; as if it mattered to a man like Mr. Steel, or any woman he is likely to have chosen. Still, it is mysterious, isn’t it? But what business of ours, as you say? Only, dear, you needn’t have said it quite so pointedly. Of course I’ll call as soon as I can in decency; she may let me be of use to her. Oh, bother Mrs. Venables! If she doesn’t call, no doubt many others won’t; you must remember that he has never entertained as yet. Oh, what a dance they could give! And did you hear what she said about his age? He is sixty-five, now!”

  The vicar laughed. It was his habit to let his young wife rattle on when they were alone, and even lay down the law for him to her heart’s content; but, though fifteen years her senior, and never a vivacious man himself, there was much in their life that he saw in the same light as she did, though never quite so soon.